SaaS customer life cycle and operation mode (Part 1)

This article introduces three aspects: user awareness, traffic acquisition and user conversion. It is recommended for company managers who need to grow their business but have no old customers.

What I want to share today is the customer life cycle. In fact, in your business and operations, if the R&D cycle ensures the stability of your product, and the product life cycle ensures whether your product can go through prosperity, then the customer life cycle determines whether you can achieve your business goals. We need to design a series of actions based on customer behavior to improve customer conversion.

If you completely ignore the existence of the user life cycle, then you have basically given up exploring users, and your product will definitely not sell well. There are many articles on the division of customer life cycles, most of which are imported and have not been adapted to the Chinese market. This article combines some foreign articles with domestic practical experience to share, which will definitely be of great help to your user operations.

If we divide the customer's behavior path, we can divide it into these six stages. For most companies, the first three stages are more important, and the last three stages are more suitable for users of a certain scale. Therefore, you can find the right stage according to your current business model.

1. Awareness

Cultivating user awareness is very important. However, most domestic companies have given up on this stage. Under pressure from revenue and the downward environment, most companies focus on traffic and purchases.

You can think about a question: would you buy a product that you have never heard of and for which you can find no information when searching online?

Most users will not buy such products. According to marketing theory, users prefer products that already exist in their minds. They prefer products recommended by people they trust, including Internet celebrities and acquaintances. There are relatively few Internet celebrities in the domestic SaaS circle, so most users prefer products recommended by acquaintances.

For most companies, your company does not have enough users to recommend products for you, so you need to rely on your own abilities to plan product operation plans.

First, cultivate user awareness. Cultivating user awareness corresponds to brand building. In this link, if you have money, you can place advertisements in places where users gather. If you don’t have money, you can publish more PR articles. If that doesn’t work, creating your own media can also highlight the value of some products.

Many people say that user awareness training has no effect, so you need to check whether the content you create reflects value to users and whether your content is recommended to target users.

Remember, building user awareness does not rely on quantity, but on good content + the right channels.

2. Traffic

To put it bluntly, traffic determines the survival of most companies. If you need a lot of traffic, then you must have your own unique skills.

Companies that believe in the overseas growth model can generally attract large amounts of traffic, but their conversion capabilities are poor; companies that run businesses domestically are more dependent on relationships and sales, and generally cannot attract traffic.

Many people believe that traffic is as easy to get as the flowers on the top of the mountain. Every time they encounter setbacks and wander around in a wall, they sigh and say that it is really difficult to do business in China.

If there is a topic about traffic, there are a lot of them on the Internet, and everyone can tell you a lot of principles. If you want to summarize it in a simple sentence: if you have money, spend money on advertising for quick results; if you don’t have money, create content and spend time.

There are two extremes for companies: either they spend money quickly and burn themselves to death, or they go bankrupt during the agonizing wait.

The correct approach is to consider what resources you have, what characteristics your team has, and then what kind of results you can achieve. All of these need to be estimated.

If you don’t take this step, you will definitely fall into the misunderstanding of “the next one”, and always think that the next channel will be better. For example: the effect of your advertising on Baidu is not good, and you have not considered optimizing it again. You will definitely think that Douyin’s customer acquisition is better.

There are also many people who only add words, delete words, adjust prices, and adjust regions when optimizing ads, leaving everything else unchanged. Optimizing ads is a systematic project, and you need to consider many aspects and analyze based on your data.

If you want to be a free channel, there are no other channels available except self-media. You have to consider whether you have high-quality content to acquire customers, and it takes a long time to accumulate.

Now that the cost of acquiring customers remains high, you should consider how to improve user conversion and get users to pay while obtaining accurate traffic as much as possible.

3. Purchase

Sales is a job that requires invisible skills and comprehensive abilities. Most domestic products require sales follow-up before they can be purchased, and there are still too few products that users can order on their own after viewing them.

First, domestic users’ payment awareness and habits determine their purchasing methods; second, the capabilities of most domestic products are really average, and if you don’t find a salesperson to train you, you still don’t know how to use the product; finally, the product does not provide users with an experience environment at all, hoping to get their contact information and convert them directly over the phone.

Before buying a product, users need to have a comprehensive understanding of the product and consider the price factor. Secondly, they want to experience the product in the business. Finally, your service is also one of the factors that customers consider buying.

Many domestic products do not provide a comprehensive introduction to their products. I have looked at the official websites of several call centers, and the design of the pages is exactly the same, even the product business introduction pictures in the middle are surprisingly consistent. The advantage of doing this is that you can make as few mistakes as possible at the lowest cost, and pass the test in front of the leaders. The disadvantage of doing this is that if you don’t have other content to reflect it, users will not remember you at all.

This is also related to the domestic management methods. Although leaders do not understand professional website display methods, they can direct professionals to do things according to their ideas and keep their jobs in a way that minimizes mistakes.

Even if the user has contacted the company, there are still many issues that need to be dealt with during the B-side customer's purchase process, such as: sales follow-up, pre-sales solutions, after-sales service and other cooperation of various teams. Different roles have different problems. The company needs to consider how to improve the team's collaboration efficiency to promote user conversion.

In terms of user conversion in China, various methods such as telemarketing and business can be considered depending on the size of the users. In the end, conversion still depends on people.

The sales team is the one that has the most contact with them. The professionalism of sales also has a certain impact on user conversion. For small companies, finding the right people is the best way to solve sales performance. You can also see that many companies have recently started using SRCM or selling mobile phones in order to weaken the resources of sales staff.

In any case, it is absolutely urgent to improve the capabilities of your sales team, whether you are acquiring customers online or through offline resources.

Author: Zhang Mu, Operations Officer

Source: WeChat public account "Operation Officer Zhang Mu" (ID: coozhangmu)